Aye, right.

Funnily enough, I got another tattoo yesterday, a few hours before reading this story:

Rouslan Toumaniantz said today that Kimberley Vlaminck 'absolutely' agreed she wanted 56 stars tattooed on the left side of her face.

But now the 18-year-old is suing Toumaniantz, claiming she had asked him for only three stars - and had fallen asleep during the procedure, waking up to a nightmare in her Belgian hometown of Courtrai.

So it is very fresh in my mind that... ah, how can I put this? It hurts like buggery. Sure, some people have higher pain thresholds than others. But no-one just drifts off and has a nap while having their chin tattooed. There's not much flesh on the chin; the needle would be practically scraping bone. It's not a bloody massage.

Toumaniantz claimed Kimberley was happy with the work when she left his shop in Coutrai but changed her mind when her father saw the stars.

His version just sounds so much more plausible than hers.

As an aside, I have to say that the guy's done a beautiful job and Kimberley looks gorgeous. Just a shame she's... well, you know.... She's already demonstrated her propensity to sue people, so I'll not publish my thoughts on her personality.

Not sure I could be bothered travelling all the way to Belgium for my next tattoo — especially since I live next door to an excellent tattooist, which is a tad more convenient — but, if you're in the Courtrai area, it might be worth popping in.

'I maintain that she absolutely agreed that I tattoo those 56 stars on the left side of her face,' he told newspaper La Derniere Heure.

'A witness, a woman who was present, has already been questioned by police, and she confirms it.

'But be that as it may: Kimberley is unhappy and it is not my wish to have an unsatisfied client. There is a way to remove the tattoos with the help of a laser. I accept to pay for half the cost.'

That's £4250 he's offering, just as a goodwill gesture, compared to the original cost of the tattoo of £55. That may be the best customer service I've ever seen. What a thoroughly decent guy.

Fantastic.

Nothing to do with Iran, this:

Carlos Owens had handled all kinds of machines as an army mechanic, but he always dreamed of using those skills for one project: his own "mecha,” a giant metal robot that could mirror the movements of its human pilot.

Owens, 31, began building an 18-foot-tall, one-ton prototype at his home in Wasilla, Alaska, in 2004.

He didn't half. Go see the photo.

He foresees mechas having uses in the military and the construction industry but acknowledges that right now they’re best suited to entertainment. The first application he has in mind: mecha-vs.-mecha battles, demolition-derby style.

OK, I love this guy.

The nature of democracy. Again.

Here, in passing, I mentioned one of the greatest but often overlooked advantages of democracy:

Even if it's true that Bush is only doing what he's doing as part of a secret plot by Big Oil to take over the world, or by a sinister cabal to establish a New World Order, so what? That only actually matters in a tyranny. In a democracy, whatever our would-be leaders' true motivation, they have to get our support to get their way. And it doesn't matter whether they're lying about their motivations, because, when we vote, we're not. So, even if Bush didn't really give a damn about the Iraqi people, it didn't matter, because, for him to do what he was trying to do, he needed the votes of tens of millions of Americans. What matters is whether those Americans cared about the Iraqi people.

And now look what's happening:

Lots of folks argue — including President Obama — that Mousavi isn't that different from Ahmadinejad on issues like Israel and Iran's nuclear program and so why make such a fuss? I think this is an awfully static analysis of the situation. Sure, if the election had gone swimmingly and Mousavi had won, he might have been the dutiful Egon Krenz of the Mullahcracy, with some window dressing reforms to placate the masses. Or he might have done better than that. Who knows? But all of that is academic now.

Moreover, that debate is a little annoying because it tends to support the idea that this was a legitimate election in the first place. Mousavi was a handpicked hack. His leadership of the reform forces is by default or as Michael Ledeen put it, "He is a leader who has been made into a revolutionary by a movement that grew up around him." At this point the question is, do the people of Iran succeed or does the clerical politburo and its henchmen succeed. If the people succeed, the regime is in real trouble. It's amazing how so many observers doubt something the regime itself manifestly knows. If these protests weren't a threat to the regime and the established theocratic order the regime wouldn't be shooting people.

Mousavi didn't intend to be a reformer. But now he's been turned into one by his supporters. Democracy has this power, not just to choose its leaders, but to shape them.

I was one of those people who tended to disagree with Bush over the value of democracy. I thought that you needed freedom and a stable society first, then true democracy could take root. While he called for democracy, I called for liberty. And Iran was always a good example of why mere voting by itself isn't enough.

Or so I thought. We're seeing an evil and brutal regime under serious threat from the results of the sham elections that took place inside its rigged system. The dictatorship rejected hundreds of would-be presidential candidates, allowing only those whose unequivocal loyalty it could rely upon to stand. And it doesn't matter: the people are forcing their views into the system and into the candidate. Mousavi no longer has much choice in the matter: he's a reformer whether he likes it or not.

Looks like Bush was right after all: democracy can lead to liberty.

Reporters still not reporting.

I couldn't help but be amused by the news reports that there are allegations of election-rigging in iran. This is news? Obviously the election's rigged: that's built into the Iranian system.

What our news reporters would have reported, if they could still be bothered with thought or honesty or both, is that there are allegations of extra unauthorised election-rigging that isn't of an approved type.

Talking of good writing...

Probably the best writer in the English language today is Michael Marshall Smith. And now he has a blog. This is a Good Thing.

He writes great stories, but the blog is a stark reminder of the fact that his excellent plots are just icing on the cake. It's just his prose that is inherently good, no matter what he's writing about.

For instance, thousands of people have complained about what's happened to British rubbish collection over the last few years. But none have done it like this:

When I was a kid, bin men had an aura, a mystique, something of the night about them: fierce, semi-mythical beings who came with the dawn and hefted sacks of household trash into the grinding back-ends of their trucks, before rumbling ominously away. Their speech was a sequence of impenetrable grunts and howls; their clothes looked as though they had been worn for decades, or secreted like outer skins. The only contact normal citizens had with these creatures was the ‘Christmas box’: a seasonal cash offering given to the member of the tribe that walked most convincingly on hind legs — this ritual having (to my childhood mind, at least) the flavour of a bribe to ensure that the bin men not sneak back in the night to wreak havoc upon the houses they serviced, stealing one of the occupants (or their children) and dragging them away to a dread kingdom given over to the very hungriest of ogres and trolls.

....

So what were we supposed to do? Call the council, we were told. And do what — ask for them to send some men instead? Or command them to use the big rusted key to open the shed at the back of the depot, where lurks a last remnant of old skool bin men, chained to a post in darkness, fed with scraps of carrion, kept for the occasions when a profligate household needed a slightly-heavier-than-usual bag carried a few feet from curb to cart?

Buying the man's books is not something you're likely to regret.

Uninventing the wheel.

I don't want Iran or North Korea to have nuclear weapons. It's just a bad, bad idea. But the thing about atomic bombs is that they are now sixty-year-old technology. As you'd expect, after sixty years, they're not particularly high technology either. Not like they used to be. Schoolkids can tell you how to make them. It's only getting hold of the materials that makes building them a bit tricky. And how long is that going to last?

Imagine if we decided to stop, say, the Mongolians from developing mobile phones, or microchips, or solar panels, or satellites, or lasers or holograms or any of a whole bunch of things which may have been around a while but are still far younger than atom bombs. Could we have done it? Indefinitely? Does that sound like a realistic project?

Even if we do stop today's psycho nutters from getting hold of the things (which would rather require Barack bloody Obama wanting to stop them), we're just putting off the inevitable. Soon enough, an extremist maniac will have a fission bomb, if we're lucky, or a fusion bomb if we're not.

So, for me, all this talk of whether the Ayatollahs and Kim Jong-Il ought to have nuclear weapons rather misses the point. Let's assume they will have them. What then?

All I can see are three options.

One, try Mutually Assured Destruction again. To be fair, it totally worked in the Cold War, and seems to have kept Pakistan and India merely at each other's throats rather than dancing around in showers of blood. But it requires two things to work. It requires both parties to be basically rational and want their people to survive. The Iranians used their own children to clear minefields in the Iran-Iraq War and are rather fond of martyrdom. Kim Jong-Il is batshit crazy. And it also requires a lack of deniability. As the Sudanese are all too aware, the world's powers have become so legalistic that all you need is the faintest hint that you might not be lying when you say "It weren't me!" and they'll refuse to act. Everyone knows how you destroy London: you put the nuke in a car and deny everything. Intercontinental ballistic missiles are traceable, and therefore passe.

Two, you can ensure that any countries that do get hold of nuclear weapons find their leadership class suddenly lacking in insanity. This can only really be achieved by getting rid of the insane ones. This is my favoured option, I don't mind saying, but just look at the fuss over the last few years over the US overthrowing a man who weaponised aflatoxin — aflatoxin, for crying out loud — and replacing his brutal murderous regime with the region's second-freest society. Fair to say, it wouldn't go down well.

And then there's option three: die.

Great.

Again with the Steyn. Enough, already.

The thing about Mark Steyn is that he's a great writer. I find it puzzling that so many people who disagree with him feel obliged to slag off his writing. One of my favourite writers is Julie Birchill, and when she's wrong, she's really bloody Wrong — but still worth reading, 'cause she writes the wrongness so well. Steyn is as good as Birchill, if not better.

Anyway, all that's a mere preamble to this:

The speech nevertheless impressed many conservatives, including Rich Lowry, my esteemed editor at National Review, "esteemed editor" being the sort of thing one says before booting the boss in the crotch.

 

Respect.

Typical. No sooner does David Cameron do the impossible and persuade me to vote Tory than the Ulster Unionists screw it all up.

My MP is Lady Sylvia Hermon, a thoroughly decent person who is likely to get my vote by dint of that decency. Since the last Northern-Irish election, she has been the Ulster Unionist Party's only MP. Any party with half a brain between them would realise that this makes her the most important person in the party — or, at the very least, up there in the top three or four. Not the UUP. Every time you hear anything on the news about the UUP, it's a bunch of old men discussing important things, with the only member of their party able to wield any actual power in the UK's Parliament conspicuous by her absence. It's been very difficult not to get the impression that they view her as a bit of an embarassment, really.

And it turns out that that impression has been correct. The UUP have made an alliance with the Conservative Party — which is probably a good move in all sorts of ways, except that it turns out they've done it without consulting Hermon.

Let's just recap that, for those who missed the significance. The UUP have agreed to merge with the Conservatives. This means that all UUP MPs will from now on be Conservative MPs, voting with the Conservatives. All UUP MPs is Lady Hermon; there are no others. She wasn't consulted. The UUP leadership are all rather huffy about it and have clearly been caught off guard by some jumped-up little woman not doing what she's told, but a Conservative spokesman seemed quite happy to just call it as he saw it and accused the UUP of screwing up their people-management. Mind you...

It is understood that [her] feeling the Conservatives have little understanding of Ulster politics, compounded by discussions with one senior Tory who repeatedly referred to “Irish MPs” and Mr Cameron’s decision to wear a green tie to a unionist event, has not lessened over time.

And, now she's been told to vote with the Conservatives, she's refused, announced she'll be leaving the party, and decided to stand as an independent at the next election. And, for that, she's got my vote. Who cares if she supports Gordon Brown? He can't rely on her support; he has to talk her into it. She's a good person, and she's now shown that she'll refuse to be pushed around by anyone.

At the present time, I can't see myself standing under a Conservative banner. If my party chooses to move to call themselves by a different name, I'm terribly sorry and terribly disappointed by that but I remain an Ulster Unionist. That was certainly my mandate and I've loved serving the people of North Down. They have stood by me through the most difficult of times and if they choose and wish me to serve them I would do my very best to do that.

Lady Hermon, consider the box ticked.

Cognitive dissonance.

OK, two things.

Whenever anyone mentions the European Elections, I point out that, no, they're the EU Elections. People's response to this tends to be dismissive — one person even said to me, ah, it is Europe really. Now, the EU is to Europe what the UK is to the British Isles.

So my first question is: why is it that these same people, who insist that the EU is Europe, would not simply shrug it off if I were to say that Dublin is in Britain?

As you may have seen in the news, the BNP have won a seat in the EU Elections and are probably going to win at least one more. A lot of people are very upset about this. Thing is, though, that the EU "Parliament" is not actually a parliament, as it has no legislative power. And, what with its having no legislative power, it wouldn't actually matter if the ghost of Adolf Hitler got elected on a Stalinist ticket. MEPs can't do a damned thing except talk for money. Power over the EU resides in the Commission, to which no BNP members have been or are ever likely to be admitted.

So my second question is: why is it that the people who are most upset by the BNP's winning a seat tend to be made more angry, not less, if you remind them that said seat isn't in a real parliament?

He's only been and gone and bloody done it.

Up till yesterday, I'd been second to no-one in my contempt for the politics of David Cameron, a man whose shallow principle-less opinion-poll-based gimicky leadership has done a hell of a lot to diminish the chances of the British public having an actual choice in an election.

Well, yesterday, he got my vote.

(And a fat lot of bloody good it'll do him, since I live in Northern Ireland. But hey.)

It was interesting to note, looking at the expenses that grabbed the headlines and the respective MP's defenses of them, just how obvious it was which MPs had simply made ordinary mistakes and had put them right, which MPs had made reasonable claims which only looked a bit dodgy, and which MPs were blatantly bloody at it: the ones who haven't been taking the piss out of the system and us all are the ones who don't make their primary defence the fact that their claims were within Parliamentary rules.

Brown:

No 10 said the two shared a cleaner who worked in both their flats. Andrew Brown paid her and was reimbursed for his share of the cost.

Sounds reasonable.

Straw:

He spotted the mistaken council tax claim himself and repaid the money himself. ... "It is an error, which obviously I wish hadn't happened, but in circumstances in which I was incredibly busy during that period - that is not an excuse, it is just an explanation."

Fair enough.

Mandelson:

"The fact is that these allowances would not have been paid if they weren't within the rules"

At it.

Darling:

"The claims were made within House of Commons rules"

At it.

Prescott:

"Every expense was within the rules of the House of Commons on claiming expenses at the time."

At it.

(I have to admit to a spot of sympathy for Prescott. He's a big man, and yes, loo seats will break. That sort of wear and tear is at least arguably a legitimate claim, and it's a shame that it affords the public such a perfect opportunity to take the piss. Or, rather, it would be a shame if it weren't for the fact that the corrupt bastard also claimed for that vital living expense of having mock-Tudor beams stuck onto the front of his house. So he's going to Hell for his corruption and his taste.)

Blears:

Ms Blears said she had complied with both Commons and Revenue and Customs rules

At it.

(Incidentally, Blears has decided to cement her reputation as an idiot by attempting to make voters feel better about her by drawing their attention to the fact that Capital Gains Tax, for her, is optional. It's compulsory for the rest of us, Hazel. Oh, and tax is a percentage. Have you not noticed the way your colleagues are paying back 100% of their dodgy claims? Do you really think you can come out looking good by making a big grand public gesture — waving the cheque on camera, no less — of doing conspicuously less than everyone else? You're really not doing yourself any favours. Stop digging.)

Follett:

"I claimed it, it's within the rules and I have no comment to make."

At it and obnoxious with it.

Woodward:

"If I try to make almost any defence of our collective position - or my position - it looks terrible."

Nice try, but actually no. Plenty of your colleagues have made perfectly reasonable defences which aren't pissing us off, because they appear to be honest. Since you're part of the organisation trying to force this damnable database onto us, I'm sure you'll appreciate that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

And all this is why I am so impressed with Cameron's very simple statement of the truth:

"I don’t care if they were within the rules," he said of the expenses claims, "they were wrong."

Damn right.

And he's decided to bypass (and, let's face it, politically completely out-maneouvre) the rest of Parliament by not waiting to see whether their self-absorbed and self-interested faffing ever comes up with a decent solution, and instead has announced new — and incredibly strict — rules especially for Tory MPs. He's actually not going to let them claim for food any more. Food! Now, that is a legitimate expense.

Now, yes, he should have done it sooner. The charitable view is that he really was naive enough to trust his fellow MPs to be as honourable as they like to call themselves. More likely, this is more of that opportunism that's got him where he is today and has previously earned him my contempt. But the fact is that, this time, it's worked. It had to, eventually, I suppose. His unprincipled vote-chasing has run him smack into a bloody great principle. And he's stuck with it now.

I am reminded of one of the more interesting responses to Bush Derangement Syndrome — it was a defense of democracy, in fact, and I wish I could remember who wrote it. Might have been Jonah Goldberg. Anyway, the point is this. Even if it's true that Bush is only doing what he's doing as part of a secret plot by Big Oil to take over the world, or by a sinister cabal to establish a New World Order, so what? That only actually matters in a tyranny. In a democracy, whatever our would-be leaders' true motivation, they have to get our support to get their way. And it doesn't matter whether they're lying about their motivations, because, when we vote, we're not. So, even if Bush didn't really give a damn about the Iraqi people, it didn't matter, because, for him to do what he was trying to do, he needed the votes of tens of millions of Americans. What matters is whether those Americans cared about the Iraqi people. And there was a lot of evidence that they did. It only matters whether our leaders lie about facts.

So I don't even care why Cameron has said what he's said and done what he's done in the last couple of days. He's right, and he's doing what's right. Sure, you've got to worry about how consistently a man with no principles can be right, but this thing's big enough for the rest not to matter so much. And it's also big enough to significantly shape the behaviour of the party. Overnight, the Tories have become the most principled party, and clearly not because they wanted to, but because they've been forced into it by Cameron. Well, OK, then. I'll take him as Prime Minister.

Meanwhile, Stephen Fry, in the course of one interview, lost pretty much all the respect I had for him. Fry's logic is very simple and very stupid. Journalists are corrupt. This story of corruption has been brought to light by journalists. Therefore it's a non-story. Presumably, he took the same attitude to the news of Robert Maxwell's corruption. Yeah, thought so.

In answer to your accusation, Stephen, that you so carelessly hurled at the whole damn world, no, I don't fiddle my expenses. I'm quite scrupulous about them, and have previously done, with no fear of opprobrium to motivate me, what MPs have only done when dragged through the media kicking and screaming: suggested to my employer that they not pay certain items if there's any doubt about them. And in answer to your astonishingly profound cluelessness, the reason people are pissed off about this — and yes, they are pissed off; it's not just a load of invented hype by the media — is that (a) the money the MPs are fiddling is ours, so obviously we give more of a damn than when some journalist claims for a crate of champagne they never really drank, (b) MPs get to write their own rules about what they may claim, and (c) MPs have passed legislation that stops us the plebian bloody public from doing exactly what they've been doing and written specific exclusions to that legislation for themselves. And then they try to exclude themselves from the Freedom of Information Act, too, to stop us finding out. It stinks. I might add that Stephen Fry usually works for the BBC, so most of the money that he so happily tells us he's stealing is also coming from us taxpayers. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that he's so staunchly supporting politicians just now.

Here's the thing. If I were to cheat on my expenses, I would be cheating my employers, who are the same people who make the rules governing my expenses and who check my expenses — in other words, the people who are potentially being cheated get to take measures to ensure that they're not. Furthermore, my employers will go under if they don't make a profit, and so they take reasonable measures to control the expense claims and keep them reasonable. If expenses start to hit their profits, they'll make fewer things allowable and cut back on our salaries. And if one of their customers refuses to pay for the cost of our expenses, well... they lose a customer. Big deal.

When MPs cheat on their expenses, they are cheating the taxpaying public, who do not get any say in the expense-claiming process — the people being cheated cannot do anything to stop it happening. The rules governing the expenses are written by MPs themselves, and their expense claims are checked by a wing of their own organisation, comprised of people who face no prospect of any sort of loss if the expense claims are too large and who therefore have no interest in keeping them under control. If MPs' expenses get so big that they start to cost far too much money, well, hell, there's plenty more tax where that came from, eh? And if any of use refuse to pay the cost of their expenses, they send us to jail.

It's sad to see how an intelligent man such as Stephen Fry can be reduced by his own blind loyalty to the Labour Party to such utter fucking stupidity that he can't even see, far less understand, such simple and obvious distinctions as these.

And there goes my chance of ever appearing on QI. Another ambition bites the dust.

Kate Hoey gets it, bless 'er. Maybe she'll make a decent Leader of the Opposition.